New Grub Street (Gissing, 1891)

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Gissing, George. New Grub Street. Pub. 1891. Ed. Katherine Mullin. Oxford World's Classics, 2016.

Notes

General

  • interesting to refract Reardon through Milvain at the start
    • omniscient focalization switches to Amy Reardon in ch 4
  • starts 1882, and this temporal fixity is key
  • 10 milvains bourgeois (but not too comfortable)
  • 13 a distinct meritocratic strain to milvain's bourgeois perspective, "we people of brains"
  • 14 jasper remembers meeting Yule at the British Museum reading room
  • the Yules are "dwellers in the valley of the shadow of Books"
    • 18 this jasper says specifically means BM Reading Room
  • 29 striking description of jasper and Marian watching the train pass from a bridge
  • 69 Reardon a disappointed scholar
  • 91 class difference and the tenuousness of Yule's scholarly identity played out in correcting his working class wife's speech
  • 106 nuancing Jasper's self serving vanity a bit with self awareness
  • 149 the time signals are awkward: a little bit ago it was "now we've caught up to milvain's mother dying," now "a month earlier Milvain called on Marion"
    • 182 again confusing chronology (rushed)
    • and 314
  • ch 13-14 controversy over whether Milvain wrote a bad review of Yule's book (he says he didn't on 163)
  • 196-7 secularity of the reardons
    • 208 Edwin observes the clock of the Marylebone workhouse and the church chiming together: nice twining of oppressive institutions and institutionalized time
  • 213 a nice little knot the Reardons are in: Edwin is weak and selfish, as Amy says, but she's also a snob (she has hard ideology undergirding her position: is his therefore the worse because a personal failing?)
  • 214 Mrs Yule's intellects deficiency in living in the opinions of other people: thinking of Armstrong 2005, is this really a debility?
  • 264-5 jasper's ruthlessness in his position of pursuing a wife with money (Marian reveals her inheritance on the next p)
  • 293 though it describes affect again the clarity of Marian's position when jasper professes his love: "Hungry for passionate love, she heard with a sense of desolation all this calm reasoning."
  • 308-9 Reardon has a nasty bit of anti-New Woman misogyny when Amy suggests a legal separation: she has ruined his life and debased hers by "being allowed to act with independence"
  • 313 interesting note re Married Women's Property Act 1882 -- Amy by it has legal standing to inherit from John Yule directly; a few months earlier and that money would have been legally Reardon's
  • 365 the firm responsible for marian's inheritance goes bankrupt
  • 450 Milvain's hatefully "practical," individualistic and selfish philosophy
  • 456 Amy's arc seems to be that of an ignoble person who has some decency in her
  • the ending felt a bit rushed from the pathos of Reardon's death to Jasper and Amy marrying

Themes

Reading/Writing

  • 12 market for children's fiction and religious stories
  • 22 Yule presents an anti "spreading civilization" arg about literary trade, in line with moral concerns about novel reading
  • 25 Marian misquotes Alfred Tennyson about ash trees (from Princess not Idylls)
  • 27 Reardon distinct from "ordinary circulating novel" (i.e. mudie's cf Cambridge History of Libraries et al)
  • 35 Yule's mind "a literary cyclopedia"
  • 49 Amy advises Edwin to write stories, which are becoming more popular in periodicals
  • 62 Amy reads a mudie's volume
  • 75 Marian is presented with an"essay on the historical drama" for her father by the author st the BM (who dismisses it on 80, until he sees he's flattered in its pages)
  • 94 Marian thinks "she was not a woman but a mere machine for reading and writing. did her father never think of this?" And ff on 95, the folly of writing about writing and the BM as "a trackless desert of print". Almost a bookish version of Dorothea wanting to live a passionate life in Middlemarch (Eliot, 1872)
    • anticipating Maud Bailey's "matrix for the susurration of texts" in Possession by 100 years
    • "literary machine" on 96
  • 110-12 extended description of Reardon suffering through his writing process
  • his habit of carrying little classical volumes around: "...my bookish habits didn't promise much for my success as a novelist"
  • 124 Reardon selling books secondhand
  • 126 Reardon and Biffen the poor pawning scholars, talking about their Greek scholarly editions
  • 128 they talk about realism and the difficulty of representing poverty, "the ignobly decent life" with ref to Zola and dickens
    • 431 Again the contestedness of realism/naturalism once Biffen's book is published to no success: "'The first duty of a novelist is to tell a story:' the perpetual repetition of this phrase is a warning to all men who propose drawing from the life."
  • 134 mudie's
  • 142 Reardon decided not to write a three-decker: "advertisements informed him that numbers of authors were abandoning that procrustean system"
    • 180 "a triple-headed monster"
  • 178 "It doesn't look like a book that fails, does it?" - Amy on Reardon's novel's binding
  • 295 when Marian accepts jasper: "All the pedantry of her daily toil slipped away like a cumbrous garment; she was clad only in her womanhood."
  • 318-9 Amy and Mrs Carter discuss the silliness of repetitive love plots in novels then ff Amy goes to mudie's
  • 336-7 alcoholic Sykes' analysis of middle class readers: they like representations of themselves (so no poverty stories) and Dickens only goes down with some because of farce and melodrama
  • 360 Yule finding it difficult to read - his vision is going
    • ff examined by impoverished surgeon
    • cataracts -- 375-6
  • 377 ch 31 starts with a very George Eliot metafictive analytical narrator moment about the audience's potential lack of sympathy with Reardon and Biffen
    • quite political though
  • 380ff Biffen nearly dies saving his manuscript from a house fire
  • 388 Reardon's cynicism about London as the best place for authors
  • 410 Milvain writes a panegyric for Reardon's novels
  • 449 Marian ends up an assistant at a public library in a provincial town

Authorship

  • 6 reardon's missed expectations of "geometrical increase" in his fortunes after publishing one novel
  • 8 "Literature nowadays is a trade" -- whole para
    • vs "unpractical artist"
    • cont on 12: a decisively anti romantic view (he as much as says "we can't all be George Eliot")
    • Amy echoes on 46, "this is the age of trade" (while it's true there were socioeconomic shifts there had been tradesman novelists, Trollope or even Reynolds, in previous generations)
  • 21 John Yule calls literary profession "pernicious," reminiscent of Pendennis (Thackeray, 1850)
  • 27 "Men won't succeed in literature that they may get into society, but will get into society that they may succeed in literature"
    • reverse of, say, Dickens (less so Thackeray or Bulwer)
  • 44 Reardon's "morbid conscientiousness" (amy's words) that keep him in writer's block
  • 52-3 Reardon visits a famous novelist to get a recommendation for the BM (as GG did Thomas Hardy) -- their mtg highlights the difficult position for authors of "solid literary criticism" before the full institutionalization of English studies
  • 66 "I have been collecting ideas, and ideas that are convertible into the coin of the realm, my boy" (jasper)
  • 70 "a man who can't journalise, yet must earn his bread by literature, nowadays inevitably turns to fiction, as the Elizabethan men turned to the drama. "
  • 175-6 Reardon bemoaning how easy it is for authors to sink into poverty
  • 190-2 Whelpdale and the professionalization of authorship
  • 275 Yule and his cronies discussing a literary academy a la the Academie Française (20 years after Arnold discussed the same -- behind the times as always)
  • 352 Yule encourages Marian (manipulatively) to sign her work in publishing an essay of lit crit
  • 400 "I always thought it must be hard work writing books" -- Edwin's nurse as he lays dying
  • 404 Jasper casts the chances of Biffen's well-done novel's survival in social Darwinist terms

Journalism/periodicals

  • 8-9 milvain associated "magazines and newspapers and foreign publishers" with the market, with which a successful writer of 1882 must associate himself
  • 20 Yule mentions the same periodical reviewing the same novel twice, good and bad (note says this happened to NGS in Saturday Review) -- a bookish scandal (cont 33)
  • 33 Yule: "the evil of the time is the multiplication of ephemerides."
    • technical bibliographical term for letters, diaries, here for fragmentary essayistic journalism
  • 72 Alfred and Marian Yule living on anonymously published periodical literary criticism
    • Here and ff: Marian as her father's literary secretary
  • 93 ageism (and lack of connections) in Yule getting passed over for editorship of The Study
  • 143 Milvain offers to grease the wheels by reviewing reardon's novel
  • 148 Yule writes a diatribe against journalism as the death of prose style (which gets a response from journalists, definitely Fadge, possibly Milvain)
  • 231 Whelpdale to write a "general information" column
  • 276 Yule et al discussing a literary periodical with reference to the Fortnightly and the Contemporary as "miscellanies" & ff Marian becomes suspicious of his "calculating hypocrisy" in getting her to fund it
  • 320 Amy reading "the solid periodicals" helps her to understand Herbert Spencer and Charles Darwin - squares with the print history of how these things were popularized (see Secord 2000)
  • 405 mention of syndicate system -- late Vic development of publishing serial novel in several newspapers simultaneously
  • 407-8 Whelpdale describing designing articles for young people with no capacity for "sustained attention"

Materiality

  • 6 touches of "decorative spirit of 1882" at Milvains', i.e. William Morris aestheticism
  • 17 Yules a stationer family. eldest brother John Yule became a wealthy paper manufacturer
    • 21 Jasper thanks John for cheap paper, this a different state of affairs than in the 1850s with taxes on knowledge
  • 196-7 reardons selling furniture after much to do in order to "subsist"
    • sells it 225
  • 229 domestic materials of new poverty
  • 317 Mrs Carter's pretty things -- commodity culture

Shakespeare

  • 12 "We talk of literature as a trade, not homer, Dante, or shakespeare"
  • 66 Milvain says "tis my vocation, Hal" in talking with Reardon about the journalism he's doing -- falstaff in 1 Henry iv
  • 68 Milvain again "there is a tide" Brutus in Julius Caesar
    • then suggests Reardon title his new novel The Weird Sisters (Macbeth)
  • 168 "kind of fighting" to describe reardon's insomnia hamlet
  • 180 caviar to the General hamlet
  • 197 Reardon selling all his books but his Shakespeare and homer "indispensable companions of the bookish man clinging to life"
  • 301-1 Reardon rereads Shakespeare and is mocked for reciting five lines from Antony and Cleopatra at a shop window (starting "Caesar, tis his schoolmaster")
  • 402 Edwin quotes tempest "we are such stuff," can't get out "little live is rounded with a sleep" -- his last recorded words
    • 437 the quote is completed when Biffen takes his own life
  • 433 even though Biffen is in love with Amy he holds it in check, will not "strut Malvolio-wise" Twelfth Night
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